


Made & Remade

by weirdodecoy



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Red Hood: Lost Days, Under the Red Hood
Genre: Character Study, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Lazarus Pit Side Effects, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 01:59:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16507175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weirdodecoy/pseuds/weirdodecoy
Summary: Being dead and coming back to life leaves lasting side effects. His life unhinged and unbalanced, Jason must find his own way home. To a  home and a family that may no longer recognise him. Set on a new path and hardened by a new resolve, Jason must decide what his new place is, and what he came back to life for.





	Made & Remade

**Author's Note:**

> personally, winick did a great job with utrh, but the ending jars with jason's previous characterisation, especially if coupled with lost days. so, this is me, giving jason's hesitance and reluctance a major part in his character, right up until the end. this is a story about being lost, and about coming home. 
> 
> tw for death ments, canon-typical violence & body dysphoria.

Dimly, Jason remembers a vortex of smoke. It chokes its way down his throat, suffocates him. The pain is unlike anything he’s ever felt before. Is this dying? Is this what it’s like? He can barely think over the sound of water in his ears. He’s sinking again, and maniacal laughter is the only thing following him down.

He’s clawing his way to the surface—he can’t see anything but dark soil, he can’t breathe. He can only keep digging, work through the pain and the confusion. He can’t feel his fingers, he can’t think—

There it is, that maniacal laughter. It won’t leave him alone. The sound starts off indistinct, climbing in a dizzying crescendo as Jason can only inhale smoke, cough up blood. Faintly, all the way up, he can distinguish Bruce’s face. His gaze is hard, jaw set. Is he angry? Jason reaches up, but he can’t, the space is too small, he can’t breathe. Then another face appears, a woman with long, dark hair. She looks at him, a sad look in her eyes. 

_You remain unavenged._

It is not dark anymore, only green.

 

***

 

Talia watches him, inscrutable, from the corner where she stands. Jason can’t read anything in her eyes, her face betrays nothing, not even a distaste towards the pathetic state his safehouse is in.

Jason drops the dufflebag by the door, kicks his boots off with two quick motions. One ends up by Talia’s feet, the other under the sofa. Jason begins to shrug his jacket off, pretending that Talia’s steely gaze does not bother him.

Talia eyes the first boot, and then Jason’s trembling hands. “Qalbi,” she says, softly. “My heart.”

Jason stills, tightens his fists around his jacket. “I couldn’t do it.” 

Suddenly, there is smoke clouding his vision, and he blinks feverishly, trying to clear the spots. His mind is back to the dark alleys of his childhood, he can see the batmobile, swapped and warped like in two different realities. 

In one, a scrawnier Jason, long hair in his face, red hoodie doing nothing to mask his frame, is unscrewing the first tyre. 

In the other, Jason sees himself again. Taller, older and wearier now, muscles rippling across his back as he fixes the bomb to the only blind spot in the entire car.

Jason drops to the ground, and he grabs the dufflebag he left by the door. He unzips it, his hands shaking again. The detonator is still there. The smoke clouding his vision refuses to go away. It starts like a shrill cry in his mind, and then it gets louder, that laughter hammering away in his brain, stifling all else.

Jason reaches for the detonator, until he feels Talia lay a hand on his shoulder. “Qalbi,” she says, again, and her tone betrays something like sorrow. “Why?”

“I want to kill him,” Jason says, and his fingers close around the detonator, the laughter subsiding as he raises it, staring at it like his mother would a needle. “I want to kill both of them.” He doesn’t say, I want to make it stop. “He doesn’t get to just forget about me.” His thumb swipes over the red button, his breathing ragged. “I want him to know it was me. He has to know that it’s because he didn’t do enough. He—“ Jason lets his arm drop and he shakily exhales. “He’s just like everyone else.”

Talia kneels next to him, “I know, Qalbi.”

Jason does feel it, how deeply and viscerally Talia understands him. After all, they were both manipulated and toyed with for most of their lives. Talia knows. 

She reaches for his face, her fingers tender on his cheek. “How is your chest, Qalbi?” 

Jason turns to her. He thinks of the two, pale, twin scars adorning his chest, a gift from the Pit, along with a scrambled version of his own mind. Talia begins stroking the back of his head, and Jason lets his head fall into her shoulder, his body curling into her touch.

The smoke has subsided, and the laughter is now barely a ringing in his ears. He keeps his eyes closed, allows his breathing to resume a regular rhythm. Talia’s hands caress his head, ever so gentle. 

“Whatever you want, Qalbi.” Her hold tightens on his scalp. “If you want blood, then you shall have it.”

***

Talia leaves in the morning with the promise to send word soon and allowing Jason to keep one of her signature flame daggers.

Jason stands in front of the mirror, shirtless, examining it. The blade is curved, and it looks elegant, sharp and graceful. Much like Talia herself. Not really his style, but he can make do. 

He raises his gaze, looks at his reflection. It is a body he hardly recognizes. The broad shoulders, the much thicker thighs. After a year of training, this is what he has become. Jason drops the dagger in the sink with a clang, and then begins to poke at his bicep. 

He was all lithe as Robin, and small. Jason doesn’t want to think about it. He thinks of the crooks whose faces he used to bash in commenting on his girlish form.

He thinks of the Robin uniform. It won’t fit him now, and it’s not because he grew breasts. The two scars on his chest are just there, a physical reminder of how much he has changed. Talia told him, and told him, it was a gift. The Pit’s gift.

The Pit fixes all wounds, she‘d say, and Jason wants to laugh. There is a gaping hole cannibalizing him, now, and somehow the wrongness he always associated with his body has taken a secondary seat. If this is a gift, then Jason will make the most of it. 

The only gifts Jason ever received in his life that did not have an ulterior motive, a push to manipulate, he can count on his fingers. Bruce, he thinks. The only father he ever knew. The man that changed his life. The man that gifted him so much, but also the man that did this to him. Allowed his life to be wasted. Everything Jason gave him, only to remain unavenged.

Ever the late bloomer, hitting puberty in a fucking coffin was just the last straw. Jason was buried a child, and he reemerged something completely changed. 

He barely remembers the weeks he spent roaming Gotham after escaping the hospital. Jane Doe. Extensive brain damage. Prolonged oxygen deprivation.

He’s feeling it again, that sinking certainty that he was never supposed to get out of that coffin, his body hanging all wrong, his brain a pulp. 

He runs the tips of two fingers over the scars. Then, over the Y shaped scar running from his collar to his navel. Both a permanent brand of his fate. What business did he have coming back to life, then? What purpose? The laughter rings in his ears, flashes of a crowbar dragged across concrete. Laughter.

Jason lays his hands on the edge of the sink, his knuckles tightening until they go white. Yes, he knows what he has to do.

 

***

 

Using Batman as a measure to compare each and every new teacher Talia sends Jason’s way is probably incorrect. These are all criminals; they have done immoral things, and most have received no penance for it. They are the sort of people Batman would fight to his last, dying breath.

Which, Jason thinks, is the exactly problem. Batman is the only one who is ever at risk of paying the ultimate price. Not the men he set out to punish; not the evildoers. The man on a crusade. Jason is here to even out the scales. As he watches Egon, the german mercenary Talia hired, knock down an after man, Jason thinks that Talia was exactly right when she said that this man would train him on how to be “vicious”. 

Except, Jason already knows how to be vicious. He learned it from living on the streets, having to fight other orphans for scraps. He was taught it by his own father, by his own mother. He knows it from when he shattered that crook’s collarbone and Bruce scolded him, took him off patrol for a week. He’d called him vicious, then. 

The people Batman fights, most of them, at least, comprehend the difference between right and wrong. The price for doing wrong is simply not high enough to keep them from doing so. 

Perhaps, Jason thinks, as Egon invites him on the ring, it is time that someone taught Batman how to be vicious. Then, maybe, orphans he made soldiers wouldn’t die in the name of a lost cause. 

 

***

 

Meeting Talia always takes a second to adjust. She always comes by, unannounced, and it reminds Jason too much of times he cannot properly remember. When he was still brain damaged. When Talia used to sit with him, by the river, or on the cliff, watching the sunset, telling him stories about Bruce. 

The memories are all fractured. Even the ones from before. Jason pokes at the gaps in his mind, like he sometimes can’t remember if his mother’s name was Catherine, or if Bruce really took him to meet the Justice League just because he told him he thought Wonder Woman was cool. If it’s particularly bad, he blacks out. Completely. 

It happens more often than he cares to admit. Especially if he is fighting, or stressed, or upset. Talia calls it the “Lazarus Effect”. Something she often saw occuring in her father. She reassures Jason that it will fade over time. That he’s not damaged, just healing. 

This time, Talia comes with news. She sits across from him and pulls out a folder from her bag, laying it on the table.

“This will be unpleasant, Jason.” She says, and carefully nudges the folder towards him. Talia never calls him Jason.

He flips the cover, and the reaction is instantaneous. He wants to throw up. The pictures are blurry, but Jason wouldn’t mistake it for anything else. The uniform is exactly the same, the golden R a beacon on the black background. A new Robin. For a long moment, all Jason can hear is the ringing in his ears.

“Qalbi?” Talia whispers softly. She leans forward, opens her hand. “I don’t know what he’s thinking. This is—”  
“How,” Jason can barely make the words out. “How old are these?”

“Taken last night.” 

“Last night?”

Talia nods. Her hands have curled into fists. 

 

Jason’s last days with Egon pass in a flurry after Talia’s visit. He still isn’t distracted enough to not notice the little child trafficking operation Egon has running on the side. 

Its fast work. It takes less than an hour to take care of all of Egon’s lackeys after he finds out where the operation is headquartered. Then, Jason sits down in Egon’s office, patient. Taking him out when he least expects it is an absolute treat. 

Jason has taken a liking for guns. He enjoys the ease, the comfort of having what has, almost always, proven to be an infallible weapon. Plus, it’s a effortless, calculated finger sticking up to Bruce. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” Egon tells him, in his thick, almost incomprehensible german accent when he notices Jason in the corner. 

Jason doesn’t answer. He feels for the gun in his hoodie’s pocket. His gun of choice is small, light, and packing a punch. In his hands, it almost feels like a grappling gun. 

“What? You want a cut?” Egon is leering at him. “Sure, we can work something out.”

Suddenly, Jason feels like using the gun would remove all the fun from this encounter. With a snarl, he throws himself at Egon, grabbing him by the shoulders and slamming him backwards, into the wall. Egon tries to punch him, but Jason’s too quick. He sidesteps, grabbing Egon’s arm using his own momentum to hurl him into the ground. Jason then begins to punch him in the face viciously until he feels a satisfying and telltale crack. He stands over Egon’s body, wiping his bloody knuckles on his jeans. Then, he picks up his gun and screws on the silencer. The shot sounds just like a whistle.

Bruce always liked to stress the importance of knowing one’s own enemy. Well, if so, then Jason has done exactly what Bruce taught him to do.

 

***

 

Jason pops his knuckles with a satisfying crack. The garage is dimly lit and it is almost too dark to distinguish the blood surrounding the still body of the mobster from the concrete. Jason got him good.

The man comes to with a spasm. He heaves for a second, tries to stand. Jason chuckles as he lays a booted foot on the man’s chest.

“You’re not going anywhere.” 

The man stares up at him, anger and pain distorting his features. Jason leans back on the car, crossing his arms. The boot remains firmly placed on the man’s chest.

“Who the fuck are you?” His accent is thick, and he spits out more blood.

Jason shrugs. “Doesn’t matter, but you’re going to tell me where the Joker is.”

“I fuckin’ told you—“ he coughs up more blood again, and Jason hopes that he’ll last through another beating, because he doesn’t want to have to go hunting for one of these scumbags again. “Don’t have anything to do with that clown.”

Jason slips his brass knuckles from his pocket and calmly begins to put them on. “See,” Jason fixes the first on his right hand, “we both know that’s a lie.”

The man watches him almost frantically, but that’s the thing with Russian mobsters, they’re too angry to care most of the time. But Jason can take his time, drag it out of this guy, because he can do what Batman won’t.

“You’re too dumb to shut up about working with the Joker at the bar,” Jason tightens his fists experimentally, and in one swift motion bends down to grab the guy by the collar, forcing him in his face. “So why so shy now?”

The man finally breaks down after Jason lands a decisive (fifth) kick to his balls. He lets go of the man’s collar, dropping him to the ground. The man crumples to his knees with a whine. Jason reaches for his holster, cocks his gun.

The man’s eyes widen, and he starts shaking his head, trying to talk through his swelling lip. “I haven’t done anythin’!”

“Are you innocent, then?” Jason growls.

The man looks startled, surprised, and Jason doesn’t hesitate. The sound of the gunshot bounces off the garage walls for a moment, and then everything goes silent.

 

Talia is waiting for him at his safehouse, just like that time Jason tried to make the batmobile explode. It’s been two years, but Talia has stayed, her faith as unwavering as ever. Jason has no idea what she’s believing in him for, but he will not disappoint her.

“Qalbi,” she greets him. Jason shrugs out of his leather jacket, making his way to the kitchen sink so he can at least wash out the tacky blood that has dried all over his knuckles. 

Talia’s nose quirks when he turns and her eyes settle on the damp crimson stains on his jeans. “I paid for you to train, but I didn’t think that would include killing all your teachers.”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t kill one of your guns-for-hire, I was just looking for some information.”

Talia’s brows rise slightly. “I thought we had agreed you were not ready yet.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Jason leans against the counter, thinks of what to say. “It has to happen, sooner or later. It’s already been two years, Talia.”

“Qalbi,” Talia steps towards him. “Your training is not complete. You cannot hope to take him on, and win.”

Jason looks away, turns his back on her. “I don’t need to win—“ He stops, runs a hand through his hair. “I just have to show him.” 

He can hear Talia breathe in deeply from behind him. “He is your father, Jason. What do you expect him to do, exactly? What will this plan of yours accomplish?”

Jason almost flinches, but he turns instead, and if Talia weren’t so fucking tall he’d be towering over her right now. Since when did Robin become six feet tall? Jason shrugs the thought off, boxes it away for later, and glares at Talia.

“You trained me for this. You want it as much as I do. Talia, it can’t go on like this.”

“Qalbi, just give it more time.” 

“Always time, Talia, always time. I don’t fucking understand.” Jason wants to quiet the voices in his head, the laughter that won’t leave him alone. There is no more time.

“You cannot hope to win against him, Jason. I do not want to see you hurt—please, Qalbi, forgive him. For both our sakes. Please, understand this.” Talia raises both her hands, takes Jason by the shoulders, forces him to look her in the eye.

“Were you lying, then, when you promised me blood.”

Talia’s fingers dig into his shoulders, and it is the only sign that Jason has almost gotten through to her. Her features remains unmoved. “No, Qalbi. Take the clown. Take him. But your father—forgive him for not saving you. Forgive, Qalbi. You cannot possibly—“

“I have forgiven him for that!” Jason shouts. “A thousand times over!” He steps back, lets Talia’s hands drop from his shoulders. “Do you know why I had to kill those teachers you sent me to? Do you know why?”

Talia just stares at him. So she does not understand, after all. “You don’t have to prove anything, Jason. Not to me. Not to him.”

“Talia, don’t you understand? Someone has to kill scumbags like that—someone has to do it, or nothing will ever change. He doesn’t understand, and I will make him. It has nothing to do with forgiveness. That is what I will prove to him, Talia. I will do what needs to be done.”

 

***

 

Gotham is nothing but grime and the smell of car exhaust, but from the top of Wayne tower it almost morphs into something different, the glittering lights like a jewel over the bay. From here, it is not the city Jason grew up in.

He takes a deep breath as he steps to the edge of the Tower, stopping just short of the drop. This is his last chance to turn back before everything is set in motion. Talia told him as much, a few hours prior. 

It doesn’t matter, it would too late no matter what Jason decides now. Everything was set into motion long ago, when he decided to bust the tyres from a strange car parked in Crime Alley.

Jason takes the helmet from the duffle bag slung over his shoulder. The sleek material stares back at him, his own reflection blood red. With a quick motion, he fixes it on, the clasp shutting with a click. 

Metamorphosis complete, Jason can emerge from his chrysalis. 

The view from here was always a kick, and Jason takes another moment to savour it, perhaps for the last time. Then, he shuts his eyes, inhales deeply, and jumps.

 

***

 

Jason watches the mobsters gather around the table from above, his fingers wrapped around a rifle. 

Jason is itching to pull the trigger, just end it then and there, but he has been taught that a good trap involves patience. So, he settles down. He listens, leaning forwards, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

“If this wasn’t your fucking idea then—”

A quick sequence of shots silences them all. “It was me.” Jason says, calmly. The rifle in his hand smolders. In a synchronized movement, the mobsters look up.

“Who the fuck are you?” Says one, hands grappling for his gun.

Jason points the rifle at him. “Not a smart move, pal.” The mobsters each blink up at him, and Jason keeps the rifle trained on the first one. “You all work for me, now.”

A rustle. “What the fuck?” “No fucking way!” “What happens if we don’t want to?” “Who the fuck do you think you are?” 

Jason throws the bag he’d been keeping by his side over the railings. It lands with an empty thud on the table. “Go on,” Jason leans further down. He knows they can hear the grin in his tone. “Open it.”

 

***

 

No dealing to children. The first rule Jason carves in each and everyone of his new recruit’s brains. The only language these people understand is violence, so Jason makes sure the threat rings out, loud and clear. Anyone caught dealing to children will have one hand less to deal with. Easy, gruesome and straightforward. Just like they like it. 

Everything else proceeds more or less smoothly. This is Gotham; nobody is phased by the mask, nobody is phased by the strangeness. The more-or-less comes out of the resistance offered by Gotham’s current sovereign: Black Mask. One of the clubs newly under Red Hood’s protection is targeted by gunmen, and one of Jason’s most well-connected seconds is shot point blank in Crime Alley. 

Following these exciting events, Jason sits in his run-down safehouse, wiring a bomb powerful enough to take out a five storey building. Time to show Black Mask that he’s not fucking around.

**Author's Note:**

> hope u guys enjoyed this first chapter. this is an incredibly personal work for me; jason's story and character is one that is extremely relatable and empathetic to me. feel free to comment any and all of your thoughts.
> 
> for reference:   
> "qalbi" means my heart in arabic.  
> this is how i picture jason (https://www.instagram.com/p/BmO8yC0g8Tx/?taken-by=chellaman)


End file.
